Birthday
by milkmoth
Summary: Rebirth is even messier than the regular kind of birth. UlquiHime.


I originally wrote this for Ulquiorra's birthday challenge, but I set it to the side and only recently came back to it. I apologize for any odd bits. I wanted to put this out of order, but deciding on that order was tricky. Enjoy. J I always appreciate feedback.

* * *

_2_

She gives him everything – her bed, her room, her mug at breakfast.

"It tastes bitter," he says to her. She reaches out timidly to feel his head then brings her hand to her mouth to cover her 'oh!' of surprise. His head feels hot where she touched it.

"But you're so cold!" she exclaims.

* * *

_4_

She fiddles with something, a pair of chopsticks and some string. He has no idea what she is doing. Whatever it is, it puzzles and wearies him.

A few days later, he finds he can understand: his own fingers itch for something to fill the void.

* * *

_1_

"_You…"_ she whispers, all concern and fear. This is the fifth time she's said that: just _you._ Her eyes look huge and frightened. "You're sick…"

_It is this world that's sick, _he thinks, as the scum comes back up out of his stomach. _It is twisted to put me here. _

She places a tentative hand on his bare back, but as soon as she does he arches it to retch again into her toilet.

He opens his eyes to the blinding fluorescent white of her bathroom. He shuts them again quickly. He does not want to be here. Most of all, he does not want her to have to be here with him.

* * *

_9_

He does not speak of these to her because he fears that he is an anomaly. Certainly no human can imagine the things he dreams. No human can imagine heads like fountains, the crunch of fourty-four bones at a time, the screams of lost souls.

Before, they were on mute. Now every single one haunts him.

* * *

_10_

He hears the scream beginning, the last drop of air sucked in, and out – _BZZZZZZZZZZZT._

He starts up, his hands groping blindly across the table. Something falls to the ground with a clanging.

The timepiece continues its scream: _bzzzzzt, bzzzzt, bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt. _

Orihime runs in to find him clawing about like a blinded cat.

"Ulquiorra-san – Ulquiorra-san-"

"This – _thing _–"

She stares at it, brows furrowing. Then, unexpectedly, she laughs. He stills to stare at her, not altogether pleased at the situation. He mentally pushes the screaming timepiece into the background, focuses instead on her laugh. It's so soft that he could have mistaken it for a child's hiccup.

He realizes he's never heard laughter like this before.

"What… is this?"

She beams at him. "It's an alarm clock, silly! You just turn it off – like this –" The bed creaks as she shifts her weight to it, stretching past him to press a button.

He notices she's very close. Her bare knee brushes against his pant leg.

The horrible noise only grows louder. Her face contorts. "Oh. Um, wrong button?" Weak laughter. "Um, maybe…"

The horrible sound becomes the sound of monster crickets.

"Oh no! That's the white noise button. Oh. Okay. Um, let's see…"

He reaches out and presses the largest button there is.

Silence.

Her smile stretches higher across her face. "Wow, Ulquiorra-san, you really are as smart as I thought!" then she goes sober and looks down. She looks tired. Ulquiorra knows he is responsible and shifts his leg away from hers. He shouldn't be here, and she knows it. This is all a surreality, a dream; certainly that's what she thinks.

He wants to say, _It was the largest button, I merely pressed it_, but he does not want to imply that she is incompetent, even if she is – at least with the alarm clock buttons.

She scrambles back out to sit on the edge of the bed. "Sorry it made so much noise. It's to wake me up." She looks sheepishly at him. "I'm sorry, Ulquiorra-san. I forgot that I needed to turn it back down . With you showing up so unexpectedly and all…"

He notices she's already awake. She already wears her uniform, even though the morning is still dark. He would notice. He is already enthralled with the visible passage of time, the daily flood and eke of the sun.

Her whole world pulses with life and noise – and how does she stand it?

When he comes out to the kitchen, he sees that the red scarf is longer.

* * *

_1_

"Is it always this… noisy?" His stomach churns. He pulls the oversized blanket closer to him, feeling an odd sense of shame over his jutting bones. His naked, warm flesh. Her face is red.

"Noisy?" She cocks her head and holds her breath, staring at the ceiling. A moment later: "Oh, you mean… no!" She smiles suddenly, her head springing back into place. Something is different about her. He can't say what. "It's just the rain."

"The rain," he repeats. The word has a familiar feel, a whisper-rumble. There is muscle memory in the thought. He watches as a rivulet slides down her window, a long slide, a descent into nothing.

She babbles about something else now, but Ulquiorra doesn't hear. Everything feels damp here, permeated with water. Everything clogged.

The rain on the window, the smell of her soap, the drum in his chest – it's too much.

* * *

_19_ _i_

Little white things speckle the landscape and fall. They look like sand. But, no. Softer.

He realizes the room is silent.

"…You won't look at me."

He shifts his head to look at her and for the first time he can see that her hair is limp, her figure fuller, her eyes large and inquiring, asking a question Ulquiorra can't decipher.

She looks away as soon as he meets her eyes. "Never mind," she says, flashing a hurried smile.

"Your hairpins are gone," he says, unsure of why he says it.

Damn his tongue.

Damn his pulse.

_Damn._

Her right hand flies, unbidden, to the place where her hairpin used to be. She takes a half-step back, then. Her smile stays smeared on.

"What do you mean?"

He feels that beat of puzzlement, that human doubt. "Exactly what I said."

"But what you said-" she stops mid-sentence, confused by what she was about to say.

He only stares at her until she turns away completely.

After he hears the door close, he sits with his cold cup of coffee before him, staring at the window as the whiteness flickers into visibility, on roves and wood, first.

He gets up and goes to her room.

Analytically, he sifts through drawers and under mattress and rug until he finds them, stashed in the pocket of a summer dress that looks like it belongs to a child. Not to the woman before him today. He wonders why she would keep it. _Sentimental, _he thinks. A great human weakness.

He places them on the table and leaves.

* * *

_4_

He grows restless, and he when he realizes it, he feels even more impatient with himself. He – he who never had to hurry, never had reason for worry.

"A rhyme," she says, and only then does he realize he spoke the last bit out loud. Cursed tongue, throbbing with a pulse, inexplicably eager to move.

She goes still and stares down at his plate. "You don't eat much," she says, very quietly.

_Here._ Here he should say something. He should say that it is because he has no exercise, that the food tastes funny in his mouth – crass and solid, the mashing feels strange – that it is nothing like the ambrosia-slip of a human soul.

"It is not your cooking," he says. The words come out clumsy and clammy, food in his mouth; he feels the pulse in his tongue and throat quicken, dull senses or no. "Your cooking is very good."

She seems relieved to hear this, but then there is a silence thick like the fog outside and this makes him ashamed, so that he feels awkward, too. She shifts her hold on her school bag and says she ought to be off.

He remains silent as she departs. He contemplates the white noise. That's what the woman called the drizzle. White noise.

Just white noise.

Try to come to terms.

* * *

_18_

He finds his days empty when the woman is at school. He stares out the window. Time means nothing. Every human moment is a fleeting beat of his heart. He stares across her tiny room, his eyes fixing on the long red scarf. It just grows longer and longer, a never-ending tableau of sorrow knitted into the bright and ordinary.

He finds that he misses her when she's gone.

* * *

_19 ii_

On his walk, he finds the woman's world to be a tiny compression of dense blood, thrumming with color and sound.

He remembers the name for the white: snow. It comes softer than _rain_, that easy, familiar entity. Yet they are the same, he remembers. It comes out easy, now, at any rate; a slither slipping into cold, soft clouds. The snow melts very slowly when it touches him. He is not much darker than the snow, even now. He feels like a maggot, a creature of winter and the underground, unsuited for life on the surface.

He wanders. The sun peeks out of the clouds only to give out early, and in the orangey light his feet carry him past shops full of trifles.

He catches a flash of sunset more brilliant than the actual.

He pauses and she raises her head to meet his gaze through the shop window.

They stand fixed, like mannequins, just another fixture of the shop row, but her eyes grow larger and larger. The essence of things is changed.

The dark-haired girl next to her finally notices. First she lifts her head to look at the woman, then she follows the woman's gaze out the window and Ulquiorra can read her mouth, mute through the glass:

_Who is that?_

The woman opens her mouth but does not answer.

He turns to continue. _She is embarrassed, _he thinks; _troubled by my presence, _he realizes. His hands dig deeper into his pockets.

He glances up when he senses her, pauses at her reticent "Ulquiorra-san-"

She cuts off as though expecting an interruption.

He waits.

"I'm sorry," she finishes, sincere.

He tries out words to help him solve his puzzle. "You didn't want your friend to see me."

She looks shamefaced, wiped blank and fleetingly familiar.

"I'm sorry," she repeats, and he accepts it for what it is.

Together, they return home before the darkness can take over completely.

When she notices the hairpins she goes silent. Gently, as though they are fragile as dead insect husks, she picks them up, one at a time, between her index finger and thumb. She cradles them in the palm of her hand.

She returns to her room. All Ulquiorra can see is her back, the glimmer of her sunset hair.

* * *

_12_

The grotesque feeling of flexibility and fleshiness fades into a kind of vague discomfort, although no longer does his body strain with the effort of a damned existence.

What really bothers him is the sleep.

Humans treat it as a routine, but how is there anything routine about a slowing heart, a lost consciousness? The night horrors?

He hardly sleeps, even though he finds he has to. In the morning he always finds her bright-voiced and bustling around her house looking for her lost sock, trying to grab her piece of toast in time, though it is inevitably blackened.

"Nothing is going my way today," she laughs, and he sees that the places under her eyes grow darker every day.

The red scarf grows longer overnight. Red, like a blood drop or a rose or a piece of candy – at any rate, an act of defiance toward the bleak gray.

* * *

_22_

He closes his eyes on the icy white around him and tries to ignore reality.

He feels cold and sunken, and it doesn't agree with him. He can hear the slow thump of his heart. His muscles contract, but he'll do anything for his teeth not to chatter. He just wants to go cold again, but it's not happening. He wants to stop thinking. He tries to enjoy the calm, the piece, the cold, the pain. But all he can think is a dark kind of dread. He is not the same. He is a warm, beating thing, and he is slowly dying.

He stares away from the glimmer and into the dark sky. It looks light and strange colored, tinged pink and blue from streetlights on gray clouds. All the artificial light and smoggy reflection makes him dizzy.

He hears the click of a door, the lightest crunch of a footstep in the new snow.

"Your feet are bare," he says, without looking.

She creeps up next to him, awkward, her arms crossed for warmth. She wears her uniform skirt, thin blouse and paltry sweater. "Ulquiorra-san! What are you doing out here?" Her words are pleasantries, but they come out hoarse and slow with her unused morning-voice. "Shouldn't you be sleeping?"

He doesn't answer, because he could ask her the same, but he glances down at her feet. She shifts them nervously, or maybe the cold is pricking needles into them and she can't stand still in the pain. He wants to put shoes on her. Instead he looks out at the sky.

She breathes out of her mouth suddenly, creating a cloud of air, and then just as quickly in, and the slightest keening sound escapes her throat.

"I'm sorry," she says, grasping for her composure. "I'm sorry, you came back and you-"

She seems unable to ever finish her sentences, anymore. He finishes it for her. "It's not your fault."

She stops. Then, she finishes. "You were so ill," her voice quivers. "And I don't know why… you're still – you're still so miserable."

_Flesh is sickly, _he wants to say_, humans are flawed. _He feels his nose cold, runny, his lungs burning with cold, and he knows the true pain of human flesh. He sees her bare feet going blue and knows the pain of a human heart.

"You need to put shoes on," he says. "Or you'll freeze to death. Go back to sleep."

"I can't sleep," she whispers. He long suspected it. But he doesn't like to hear it. He thought she was different.

He doesn't say that he can't, either. She shifts again. He can hear her feet slipping against the snow. His hearing is coming back to him; he wonders what this means. "I have something for you," she says, and she runs inside. When she comes back, all he notices is that at least she's wearing a pair of slippers, even if they're meant for the house.

She wraps her scarf around his neck. "I just finished it - don't get too cold," she whispers, her face very close to his. He finds his hand going to her face, tucking a strand of her bangs back. His fingers linger where the hairpin used to be.

She pulls away quickly, but her hand lingers tentatively on the scarf. "I don't know why you came back to me," she says slowly. "This… it's… it's all wrong…"

He breathes in the air, and his lungs burn. He knows what she means. Her hair looks dull in the lack of light, but he can still see traces of its vibrancy. He wanted something he doesn't even think exists. Can he still want it, if it doesn't?

He thinks of her blackened toast, her mismatched socks, her cowardice and all her love.

He feels his chin quiver. Just his muscles spasming. Just the cold.

She gasps. "Oh… oh, _no_," she says, and her voice quivers, too, and tears pool in her eyes. A watery smile surfaces to keep face. "I… I told myself I'd make you laugh before I made you cry… I- I h-haven't been doing very well…"

She sounds so desperate, so concerned, so genuine, that he takes a deep breath and tries to smile for her.

She laughs through her tears. "You look scary! You're not really trying, are you?" Her cheeks flush, with cold or hope or happiness or sadness or all of those things. She turns her head to cough into her hand and for a moment, the strange electric lights catch in her white-flecked hair and he sees the faintest glimmer of sunshine.

He can't stand to think of her lungs burning, or her heart hurting. He tentatively reaches out to touch her back as it arches, and as she laughs he can imagine the sunrise that the dawn will make of them both.


End file.
